Technical update and mountain musings

It’s too early yet to sound the all-clear, but I hope that I’ve ironed out the glitches in the Kindle ebook of Sea of Secrets. It’s been unnerving to discover that none of the Kindle preview applications can be trusted. From now on, I’ll be buying a copy of my own book every time I change it. I’ve also learned a bit more about preparing ebook files–enough to realize that there is a ton more to learn. (Update, 5:00 p.m. Sunday: Amazon is still not making the ebook available in any form, but I’ve written to them about it, and hopefully it’ll be available again soon.)

But writing is the way I’d rather be spending my time, especially this weekend. I’m staying near Hayesville, North Carolina, where my work in progress–the Ash Grove trilogy–is set. Everywhere that the horizon is in view, I can see mountains. There’s something both comforting and thrilling about them; they seem to promise adventure, but they’re also a kind of stabilizing presence, a visible boundary to what would otherwise be infinite distance. I think the troubled hero of the trilogy will be newly aware of the presence of the mountains since he’s returning to North Carolina after almost two years of globetrotting. Once he may have felt hemmed in by them, but now I think he finds that they keep him from feeling unmoored; like the heroine, they make him feel safe. Of course, safety is temporary and fragile in the world of the trilogy, but the characters get to experience it at least fleetingly.